My Tradewinds

Total disaster: Ireland's worst modern maritime accident

TW+ looks back at the Betelgeuse explosion, as the 40th anniversary of the tragedy looms. Photography: Ian Vickery Sr

Ian Vickery has vivid memories of his first helicopter flight. It was the morning of 8 January 1979, and he and his father, Ian Vickery Sr, had lifted off from an airfield in the far south of the Republic of Ireland in a four-seater “bubble canopy” copter.

But this was no joyride. Ireland had just suffered its worst modern maritime disaster: several hours earlier, the Total-owned VLCC Betelgeuse had exploded at the Gulf Oil terminal on Whiddy Island in the Bay of Bantry, killing 50 people.

Now Gulf had sent Ian Vickery Sr, a freelance photographer in the nearby town of Bantry, County Cork, to take aerial photos of what was left of the broken, smoking hulk of the Betelgeuse. His son went along as his assistant.

“I was 12 years old,” Ian Jr recalls. “Gulf wanted photos asap, they didn’t care at the time, just get it done. Remember, a major disaster was still ongoing. I was Dad’s assistant, no questions were asked. We flew with the doors off, Dad sat in the front and I sat directly behind him.”

Health and safety? “Those words didn’t exist then!”

The youngster was there to reload his father’s two cameras, a Nikon F 35mm and a Rolleiflex SL66 that took only 12 shots per roll of film, hence the need to change rolls rapidly. “There was a quick-change magazine on the Rollei, Dad would change the mag and hand the used one to me. I was loading film in his cameras as fast as he was firing them off. It was fiddly at best!”

They made several flights that week, taking hundreds of photos of a scene of devastation.

Ian Jr tells TW+: “It was my first time in a helicopter, so it was exciting, but the job in hand took over and we were focused on that. We couldn’t fly too close, for obvious reasons. The tanker was still a burning wreck … the smell was everywhere … a broken ship with the aft section reduced to a molten shell and all still engulfed in a raging sea of fire is not something I will ever forget.”

The Betelgeuse had left the Saudi Arabian Gulf port of Ras Tanura on 24 November 1978 with 77,098 tonnes of Arabian heavy crude and 42,338 tonnes of Arabian light. Having berthed at an offshore unloading jetty, about 400 metres from Whiddy Island, it began discharging its cargo.

Shortly after midnight on 8 January, a low rumbling like distant thunder could be heard coming from the bay. Observers saw a small fire just forward of the Betelgeuse’s manifold. It gradually grew, then suddenly spread at an “awful pace” until the deck was ablaze from stern to bow. The vessel was wracked by a series of explosions.

A witness about 4.4 miles (7km) away reported: “A vast white sheet of flame soared into the sky and at that stage the floor under my feet and the window shook.”

+ point

The vessel broke its back, and much of the oil still onboard ignited. As the fireball reached an estimated temperature of 1,000°C, the concrete unloading jetty crumbled. One witness described seeing “the whole sky on fire”.

All 42 French people and the British cargo inspector on the vessel were killed, along with seven Irishmen on the jetty. Two French sisters, one of them five months pregnant, lost both their parents that night: their mother was onboard, accompanying her husband, the ship’s baker.

The stern sank in 40 metres of water the following night.

The official inquiry into the disaster was scathing of Gulf and several of its employees for operational and safety failings at the terminal. It also heavily criticised repair work done at the ship’s second special survey in Sembawang Shipyard in Singapore 20 months earlier.

But the tribunal judge, Declan Costello, directed his most damning criticism at Total, which he said bore “the major share of the responsibility for the loss”.

Costello found that the 11-year-old ship had been inadequately maintained and structurally weakened and was “abnormally, seriously and significantly wasted due to corrosion” of tanks and parts of the hull.

“A conscious and deliberate decision was taken by Total not to renew certain of the longitudinals and other parts of the permanent ballast tanks which were known to be seriously wasted,” he said. “A deliberate decision not to renew the tanks’ cathodic protection was taken at the same time.

“These decisions were taken because it was then considered that the ship would be sold in the near future, and in the interests of economy. Inadequate consideration was given to the effect they would have on the safety of the vessel. They had most serious consequences…”

The welding of some longitudinals renewed at the dry-docking in Singapore “was improperly carried out and contributed to the potentially dangerous condition the vessel was in”, the 480-page report said.

The “seriously weakened” hull was then subjected to “very large stresses amidships” by incorrect ballasting at Whiddy Island, leading to catastrophic structural failure. The Betelgeuse did not have a “loadicator” — a computer that would have helped calculate the stress on the 121,432-dwt vessel during ballasting. “Had Total supplied the ship with a loadicator — as it should have — the ballasting error would not have been made,” the tribunal found.

The longitudinals buckled under this excessive stress and the ship began to sag in the middle. Its back broke in two places, rupturing empty ballast tanks. A spark, either from the twisting, tortured steel, or from severed electrical cables, ignited vapours in the tanks, triggering the sequence of events leading to the explosion.

The incident hit the small town (population at the 2016 census: 2,722) hard.

“The disaster is never far from the minds of the people in the town who were alive at the time,” Ian Vickery Jr says. “You meet women who lost husbands; the children, now grown, who lost their fathers; you visit the graveyard, or even drive past, and you see the memorial to all who died. We are fast approaching the 40th anniversary, so lots of painful memories will come to the fore.”

His father was also deeply affected. “The work on the Betelgeuse was very upsetting for him, especially as he knew the local men involved.”

As for the 12-year-old assistant, he grew up to become a photographer (he still has that old Rolleiflex) and later a fireman. He is now station officer at Bantry Fire Brigade.

Both his sons have made the sea their life: one is a ship’s engineer, the other an electro-technical officer cadet. They continue a long tradition: shipping is in Bantry’s blood — first trawling, then tankers in the 1970s, when sometimes three VLCCs could be seen sitting out on the bay.

Gulf was a big employer in those days (its local administrative office was in the Vickerys’ family hotel in the centre of Bantry) and the place came alive whenever a tanker visited. Ian Vickery Jr recalls: “The whole town revolved around it. Shops even sold extra-small suits to fit the visiting Filipino and Japanese seafarers.”

Gulf never reopened the terminal and the facility was sold to US company Zenith Energy in 2014. With its 17 tanks and 1.4 million cmb of storage, it holds a third of Ireland’s strategic oil reserve. And once more VLCCs sit out on the bay.

Total disaster: Ireland's worst modern maritime accident

Total disaster: Ireland's worst modern maritime accident

TW+ looks back at the Betelgeuse explosion, as the 40th anniversary of the tragedy looms. Photography: Ian Vickery Sr

Ian Vickery has vivid memories of his first helicopter flight. It was the morning of 8 January 1979, and he and his father, Ian Vickery Sr, had lifted off from an airfield in the far south of the Republic of Ireland in a four-seater “bubble canopy” copter.

But this was no joyride. Ireland had just suffered its worst modern maritime disaster: several hours earlier, the Total-owned VLCC Betelgeuse had exploded at the Gulf Oil terminal on Whiddy Island in the Bay of Bantry, killing 50 people.

Now Gulf had sent Ian Vickery Sr, a freelance photographer in the nearby town of Bantry, County Cork, to take aerial photos of what was left of the broken, smoking hulk of the Betelgeuse. His son went along as his assistant.

“I was 12 years old,” Ian Jr recalls. “Gulf wanted photos asap, they didn’t care at the time, just get it done. Remember, a major disaster was still ongoing. I was Dad’s assistant, no questions were asked. We flew with the doors off, Dad sat in the front and I sat directly behind him.”

Health and safety? “Those words didn’t exist then!”

The youngster was there to reload his father’s two cameras, a Nikon F 35mm and a Rolleiflex SL66 that took only 12 shots per roll of film, hence the need to change rolls rapidly. “There was a quick-change magazine on the Rollei, Dad would change the mag and hand the used one to me. I was loading film in his cameras as fast as he was firing them off. It was fiddly at best!”

They made several flights that week, taking hundreds of photos of a scene of devastation.

Ian Jr tells TW+: “It was my first time in a helicopter, so it was exciting, but the job in hand took over and we were focused on that. We couldn’t fly too close, for obvious reasons. The tanker was still a burning wreck … the smell was everywhere … a broken ship with the aft section reduced to a molten shell and all still engulfed in a raging sea of fire is not something I will ever forget.”

The Betelgeuse had left the Saudi Arabian Gulf port of Ras Tanura on 24 November 1978 with 77,098 tonnes of Arabian heavy crude and 42,338 tonnes of Arabian light. Having berthed at an offshore unloading jetty, about 400 metres from Whiddy Island, it began discharging its cargo.

Shortly after midnight on 8 January, a low rumbling like distant thunder could be heard coming from the bay. Observers saw a small fire just forward of the Betelgeuse’s manifold. It gradually grew, then suddenly spread at an “awful pace” until the deck was ablaze from stern to bow. The vessel was wracked by a series of explosions.

A witness about 4.4 miles (7km) away reported: “A vast white sheet of flame soared into the sky and at that stage the floor under my feet and the window shook.”

+ point

The vessel broke its back, and much of the oil still onboard ignited. As the fireball reached an estimated temperature of 1,000°C, the concrete unloading jetty crumbled. One witness described seeing “the whole sky on fire”.

All 42 French people and the British cargo inspector on the vessel were killed, along with seven Irishmen on the jetty. Two French sisters, one of them five months pregnant, lost both their parents that night: their mother was onboard, accompanying her husband, the ship’s baker.

The stern sank in 40 metres of water the following night.

The official inquiry into the disaster was scathing of Gulf and several of its employees for operational and safety failings at the terminal. It also heavily criticised repair work done at the ship’s second special survey in Sembawang Shipyard in Singapore 20 months earlier.

But the tribunal judge, Declan Costello, directed his most damning criticism at Total, which he said bore “the major share of the responsibility for the loss”.

Costello found that the 11-year-old ship had been inadequately maintained and structurally weakened and was “abnormally, seriously and significantly wasted due to corrosion” of tanks and parts of the hull.

“A conscious and deliberate decision was taken by Total not to renew certain of the longitudinals and other parts of the permanent ballast tanks which were known to be seriously wasted,” he said. “A deliberate decision not to renew the tanks’ cathodic protection was taken at the same time.

“These decisions were taken because it was then considered that the ship would be sold in the near future, and in the interests of economy. Inadequate consideration was given to the effect they would have on the safety of the vessel. They had most serious consequences…”

The welding of some longitudinals renewed at the dry-docking in Singapore “was improperly carried out and contributed to the potentially dangerous condition the vessel was in”, the 480-page report said.

The “seriously weakened” hull was then subjected to “very large stresses amidships” by incorrect ballasting at Whiddy Island, leading to catastrophic structural failure. The Betelgeuse did not have a “loadicator” — a computer that would have helped calculate the stress on the 121,432-dwt vessel during ballasting. “Had Total supplied the ship with a loadicator — as it should have — the ballasting error would not have been made,” the tribunal found.

The longitudinals buckled under this excessive stress and the ship began to sag in the middle. Its back broke in two places, rupturing empty ballast tanks. A spark, either from the twisting, tortured steel, or from severed electrical cables, ignited vapours in the tanks, triggering the sequence of events leading to the explosion.

The incident hit the small town (population at the 2016 census: 2,722) hard.

“The disaster is never far from the minds of the people in the town who were alive at the time,” Ian Vickery Jr says. “You meet women who lost husbands; the children, now grown, who lost their fathers; you visit the graveyard, or even drive past, and you see the memorial to all who died. We are fast approaching the 40th anniversary, so lots of painful memories will come to the fore.”

His father was also deeply affected. “The work on the Betelgeuse was very upsetting for him, especially as he knew the local men involved.”

As for the 12-year-old assistant, he grew up to become a photographer (he still has that old Rolleiflex) and later a fireman. He is now station officer at Bantry Fire Brigade.

Both his sons have made the sea their life: one is a ship’s engineer, the other an electro-technical officer cadet. They continue a long tradition: shipping is in Bantry’s blood — first trawling, then tankers in the 1970s, when sometimes three VLCCs could be seen sitting out on the bay.

Gulf was a big employer in those days (its local administrative office was in the Vickerys’ family hotel in the centre of Bantry) and the place came alive whenever a tanker visited. Ian Vickery Jr recalls: “The whole town revolved around it. Shops even sold extra-small suits to fit the visiting Filipino and Japanese seafarers.”

Gulf never reopened the terminal and the facility was sold to US company Zenith Energy in 2014. With its 17 tanks and 1.4 million cmb of storage, it holds a third of Ireland’s strategic oil reserve. And once more VLCCs sit out on the bay.

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